master cheesemonger/grocer

Chris, conventional wisdom is rather narrow-minded; in that the only cheeses that won't fall into the fire are Greek (sheep's milk) Kasseri and Kefalotyri, Cypriot Halloumi (also sheep's milk) and Friuli's Montasio (cow's milk). Cut them into pieces as long and thick as your index and middle fingers pressed together. Moisten them with olive oil and grill away at steak-hot heat. I like to moisten them with olive oil and then roll them in polenta. Halloumi is weird (spiked with mint) but good. The Greeks squeak. Montasio is OK, but it bores me. Try the Veneto's Asiago, either the young "pressato" or aged Asiago di Monte. Alpine mountain cheeses (Comte, Gruyere, Beaufort, Fontina, etc.) will fall into the fire. Even if you place the "tranches" on aluminum foil, all you'll get is melted cheese. To grill a cheese, it has to have a waxy texture, and the aforementioned are about all I can come up with. Maybe I'll try a Pecorino Toscano like Rossellino or Corsignano. Maybe I'll try a Basque sheep's cheese.

Wow. You win the Cheese Blast from the Past award. I haven't seen Chiberta from the Pyrenees in 25 years. I loved it. It was by a cheesemaker in the Basque region that simply went out of business and took his made-up name with him. The same thing happened to Beaumont from Savoie. Remember the triple-creme Belletoile? The closest cheese to Chiberta is Chimay from the Abbey in Belgium. It is around and it is excellent. Also, good, small-production Mahon from Menorca, though without Chiberta's tiny hole structure. NO, you know what? The closest thing to Chiberta, nay, the identical cheese to Chiberta is Livarot from Normandie, one of the world's most scrumptious foodstuffs. (What was I thinking about?) Bulk, kilo-wheels of Livarot are around in addition to the conventional, true Livarot that weighs 350-500g. The "secret" (it's no secret) is that this is a style of cheesemaking we call "washed-rind", and I could do a novella about it.

I am adamant that my cheeses WHEREVER they come from be a proper value. I have chosen NOT to participate in numerous new American cheeses because, while very good, they are just too expensive; for example, the Cowgirl Creamery cheeses. Outrageous. Won't carry them. The Strauss Family stuff. Outrageous. A couple of new blues from Minnesota. Ridiculous. The absolutely remarkable Yves Chaput cheeses from Quebec. Off the wall. To name just a few. Don't think that you're being disloyal, not for a minute. Not for a minute. Fairway is as much museum collection as market, and we're immensely proud of that fact, but we're not in business to support the artisanal American cheese industry or any other artisanal industry for that matter. That being said (god, I hate that phrase), our selection of fascinating cheeses and non-cheese stuff is still by far the rock'n'roll of the retail food industry, period.

I'm the first to admit that I'm a hypocrite. That being said, at cheese counters as busy as Fairway, pre-cut, plastic-wrapped cheese is perfectly fine, because it is rare that a piece is more than 48 hours old. If you're a purist, though, simply avoid any pre-cut cheese and ask if the counter has a holst piece and will they please cut your cheese fresh. As for the mold-resistant paper you have come across, I don't know. I've got other fish to fry. But thanks for the info.

Not silly at all. Thinking about it, I guess the most honest response would be that if none of those are ever in my refrigerator at home, I must not have any use for them. That being said, James Coogan the master cheesemonger at Ideal Cheese on the Eastside, just told me that after sampling a cool dozen of the grand cheeses James recommended for their cheeseburger, the people responsible for the decision (the Etats Unis wine bar) went with Cheez Whiz. And guess what? It probably tastes great. Velveeta is the cornerstone ingredient for true Tex Mex food.

First, make sure you're buying traditional, hand-ladled curd fresh chevre, as opposed to factory chevre which is made from powdered milk and frozen curd and is extruded from a machine like pasta. You ain't getting any nuance from dead, factory cheese. These enemies of the people are usually cry-o-vac-ed, though some are not. Use your common sense at market. Traditional fresh chevres vary in terms of sweetness/savoriness, tangy-ness, acidity, etc. according to the time of year (fresh chevres from spring and summer will be MUCH sweeter than late autumn and winter). The breed of goat has a lot to do with it, too; though let us not split hairs except to understand that the predominant race in France is Alpine, with some Swiss Saanen about, both known for quantity rather than nuance, whereas the rare Rove from the Garrigues is an utterly phenomenal breed whose resultant cheeses are so sweet, so rich, so tangy, so frothy and light that I could almost appreciate fresh chevre. The age of a fresh chevre (three weeks to, say, nine weeks) is not going to have undergone a perceptible change in flavor. It will lose humidity over those weeks, so the texture will change. But not the flavor. Not to me, anyway.

The Italian cheeses gathered by Formaggi Guffanti; only a few shops have them as they're very expensive; you know, the raw milk Gorg made by the old lady that only makes one a day, the raw milk Taleggio di Monti from a tiny-output cheesemaker in the Dolomiti who ages his cheeses in caves near the valley of Taleggio, etc. Also the Rolf Bieler Swiss cheeses (Gruyere, etc.), again a gatherer/ripener -- phenomenal cheeses. Call Shelli at Crystal in Boston to see who has 'em (800.225.3573) besides us. Also the French stuff Chantal Plasse is putting her name on (I never thought I'd be endorsing anything she does -- she's a daddy's-girl -- her pop a famous French charcutier -- long story . . . Best French cheeses of my life. Again, ask Shelli. The re-emergence of the great Rhone Valley cheeses, St.-Marcellin and St.-Florentin, packed in terra cotta dishes that are perfect for olives, etc. Drop-dead custardy cow's milk cheeses you merely poke at with shards of bread. How we somehow get our hands again on the world's second-greatest cheese, Vacherin Mont d'Or. NOT the boring Australian cheeses. The stravecchio Parmigiano Reggiano. Burrata -- amazing. Just lopped into messy lumps on a plate, showered with fresh-ground pepper and drizzled with ****olive oil.

The Welsh dairy industry recently beseiged me with entreaties to taste a slew of their cheeses; they couldn't even get them past the FDA for some reason which was silly because every single one of them was a new-fangled factory cheese with no redeeming quality whatsoever (I had sampled them recently in Germany). So don't get excited when you see a few of them around, which they doubtless will be. They're completely phony. The great Welsh cheeses are Caerphilly, and the best of it is made in Somerset; it is called Duckham's, and it is a dreamboat of a cheese. The Welsh Caerphilly is the Gorwydd Caerphilly made by the Trethowen family, also terrific. Also Tynn Grug, pronounced "tin-greek" -- Cheddar-like, magnificent; and Llangloffan by Leon Downey in Pembrokeshire, also Cheddar-like and equally magnificent. More than a few other cheesemakers in Wales (goats, sheep), but you'll have to travel to enjoy them.

Humboldt Fog is not a blue. Here are the drop-dead blues of the world; must not-misses: Cashel Blue County Cork UK Shropshire Blue UK Blue Cheshire UK Cropwell Bishop and Colston Bassett Stilton UK Gorgonzola Piccante Lombardy Gorgonzola Dolce " Fourme d"Ambert Auvergne Fourme de Montbrison " Bleu d'Auvergne " Bleu de Laqueille " Bleu de Gex Franche-Comte Saingorlon Dauphine Basque Bleu Pyrenees Cabrales/Picon/Gamonedo Asturias Berkshire Blue Mass. Great Hills Blue " Bingham Hill Blue Colo. I am sure to have forgotten a couple. These are off the top of my head.

Alex, don't give a second thought to an "optimum environment" except to maybe segregate your blues from non-blues. Your walk-in refrigerator is fine in terms of temperature and humidity. Cheeses are tough. They don't require that pains-taking approach unless you're putting on airs. Pay more attention to how you wrap them (loosely shrouded with wax paper, your chevres with flimsy bakery paper -- the sheets we use to pick up pastries; cut faces sealed with plastic wrap). You've got a couple of great importers in Denver. Also call Shelli at Crystal in Boston (800.225.3573); also Cheeseworks (973.962.1220); also Forever Cheese, Michelle (718.777.0772).

No, in thirty years I have never made a physical note about a cheese I have tasted. When I taste a cheese my only criterion is whether or not it is memorable. If it is memorable I put it stock. Period.

It happens when certain cheeses (soft-ripened, like Brie and Camembert; washed-rind, like Livarot and Munster) are past their optimum stage of ripeness (in French, "a point"). It doesn't mean the cheese is poison or inedible, it just means it is overripe. Lots of people like overripe cheese. Henri Voy (La Ferme St.-Hubert), one of the great Parisian maitre-fromagers et affineurs used to be in a neighborhood (Madeleine) where his clientele, like Henri, seemed to prefer many cheeses at a stage of ripeness that, were they out for sale at Fairway, my customers would be incredulous. Your problem is you have purchased a cheese that was too far gone when you bought it, OR, you simply held onto it too long for your taste.

I think I'm responding to an otherwise food-savvy person. For this reason it is my guess that one day soon the lights will go on for you regarding blue cheeses. You'll be hungry, you'll be confronted by the conjunction of a proper beverage, a crusty loaf, a crock of sweet butter and some un-named blue cheese. You'll slather a tranche of bread with the butter and you'll spread or crumble a small amount of the blue cheese atop the butter. You have a bite, and as you masticate the trio you find that on the exhale through your nose you are experiencing a sensation of pepper, berries, tobacco (the cured leaf -- not the smoke; like sticking your nose in your granddad's pouch of pipe tobacco), violets and honey. You drink. You build another one. Same deal. You're intrigued. The lights are on.

Australia (and Tasmania) and New Zealand? Boring. All dead (pasteurized); except for their butter and cream and clotted cream -- excellent. Tunisia? Derivative, pseudo-French stuff. I have yet to find anything worthy of report in far-flung locales, primitive locales, extra-European locales. I am wild about the cheeses of Sardinia and Corsica, but we all know that. Greece and Macedonia have some primitive sheep cheeses; neolithic cheeses. Sicily is doing wonderful things now that they weren't marketing outside the sub-regions twenty years ago (ricotta, Ragusano). Campania is making noise with the astonishing burrata. Watch Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. If they ever get out of the 19th C we may learn that their cheese heritage has been a great deprivation to those of us who care (Russian bastards!). Latvia is an amazing place for food (bread, cranberry candies). We have access to an embarrassment of cheeses. I do not feel compelled to find more in obscure countries. I just don't.

Far be it from me to speak ill of my fellow cheesemonger. If I had the energy and the time I'd dish til the cows come home. But I don't so I won't. All of us smug New Yorkers have a splendid cheese operation or two in our purlieus. Some are better than others. I've got no right to criticize other counters because I pay very little attention to my own. Avanelle Rivera is the master cheesemonger at the Fairway on Broadway and in Harlem. Her husband Randy is also a remarkable cheese retailer, decidedly a master, and he runs the operation at the Fairway on Long Island (Plainview). I oversee their work and put my foot down now and again, but I do so much non-cheese work that I am no more than a dilettante these days, a master cheesemonger emeritus. Avanelle and Randy do all the cheese work. I'm an importer. I ferret out and import direct all the stuff that I think makes Fairway so much cooler than any other store that ever was. The stuff you can't get anywhere else. That takes up all my time. Murray's on Bleecker is great; Zabar's has a lot of good stuff. So do Grace's and Eli's and Ideal with Jimmy Coogan, a master cheesemonger of the first water. The issue is YOU must get to know the boss of your local operation. Make her/him work for you. Ask questions. Cajole. Coddle. Praise. Share food anecdotes. Handle. Hondle. Mold and shape your local operation into the kind of counters mine were throughout the late '70's, all of the '80's and half of the '90's. Now THOSE were cheese counters. Someone (me) just WAITING for you to show up so's I could thrill you or die trying. And hell, all those other counters? What a piece of cake. I fixed it so every cheese they could possibly want is available to them. All they have to do is stock them.

Hello again. I cannot over-emphasize this reply. Cheese made from pasteurized milk is dead cheese made from dead milk. There is nothing to be done with dead cheese except a proper burial. As for he notion of a serious cheese in the hands of a home affineur, I don't know. It's just a bit Felix Unger for me. There's nothing FU about purchasing an underripe soft-ripened cheese or a too young chevre, and allowing them to lie in repose for a few weeks until they're where you want them to be. But this business of "affinage" is getting way more attention than it deserves. No semi-soft, semi-firm, firm or hard cheese is going to benefit from you stashing, rubbing, turning, wiping, sniffing, plugging, ironing -- palpating, whatever. THAT'S FU.

I think you should just make a decision to travel to one of the prolific cheese-producing regions and make it happen for yourself by being there and doing your own sleuthing. Much more fun, much more serendipity, sonderful things will happen. Asturias. Savoie. Auvergne. Catalonia. Normandy. Berry/Touraine/Poitou/Charente. Piemonte/Aosta.

Don't bother with that. Just look at what they're offering, and if it looks good it is good; if it looks dried out and not so good maybe desist. I've seen only terrific stuff lately at several joints. Don't get all caught up in that overwrought dogma. Cheese is simple stuff; it needn't be over-analyzed, over-intellectualized.

Not better, but highly enjoyable. I could parse them; the beers, the ciders, but I prefer to let you taste, say, a dry cider with a middle-aged chevre or Catalan Garrotxa or an Asturian Queso de Vare. A Pilsener with a Torta del Casar or a Belgian Chimay; a sweet cider with a Livarot or a Somerset Cheddar. These are each felicitous as regards my palate, but what about yours? Heck, I love cold Calvados with raw milk Camembert. THERE ARE NO RULES. Nothing is married to anything; that's all a bunch of subjective stuff when so-and-so says this goes best with this and here's why. I'm just not down with that.

No relaxation, no tightening. Nothing. More scrutiny, not because of raw milk issues, but because of bio-terrorism registration nonsense; documents; paper chases; young FDA and USDA officials acting like dedicated public servants with a cross to burn, trying to get themselves noticed in order to speed their ascent up the federal government service ratings number ladder. But there's just not enough of 'em to keep me from getting my hands on the cheeses I want. I've been doing this awhile. No, we will never be able to legally retail young raw milk cheeses. The FDA will never let that happen. It could be worse; we could be in Australia. No, thanks to your verbose cheesemonger and a few of his well-connected colleagues, the Codex Alimentarius has been thwarted. It is deep in a cave and no one can find it.

First, don't buy so much cheese at one time that storage is an issue; I understand that if you live a long way from your source that you may stock up from time to time, and that, I will address. But if your source for cheese is nearby, just buy enough that you wipe it all out in no more than TWO SITTINGS, and within a couple of weeks. Cheese gets stale. It doesn't "go bad" like milk, it just gets stale (or overripe, in the case of soft-ripened cheeses like Brie and with washed-rind cheeses like Pont l'Eveque) which still doesn't mean the cheese has "gone bad"; it's just too ripe for you, you sissy). It will get less stale, and will take longer to become overripe if you wrap them gently in wax paper or aluminum foil. I prefer both to plastic wrap, as plastic wrap suffocates cheese which alters it worse than if you left your leftovers unwrapped and out on the counter for however long you choose to keep it. The notion of acquiring a machine that shrink wraps your cheese is OK, I guess, but you'll never find one in my house, but then I'm a Luddite and I hate that sort of machine nonsense (even though shrink-wrapping is a constant in my daily business life). I take good care of my leftover cheeses at home. I frequently serve a soft cheese I brought home a couple of weeks ago, or a hard cheese I brought home a month ago. I have kept them isolated in a hamper toward the bottom of the refrigerator. I further isolate blues from non-blues. But I am ruthless as to whether a leftover is stale or not. Don't kid yourself. If you have relented and deemed a shard or two or three unworthy, trim their rinds away, shred them and mash them into a crock with some white wine or brandy if they're sheeps or goats; some beer or some whiskey if they're cows. Cover, refrigerate, serve as a spread til the cows come home.

Chris, this is the very thing about cheese; the fact that cheese is the most lyrical and magical of substances; the fact that even the most jaded and cynical of any of you among us, the most intolerant and dismissive -- none of the worst of you can deny that cheesemaking, the pancaking, the sandwiching, the concatenation of soil, herbiage, air and sunlight, beast and human is the most romantic and (again) magical by far of any substance in the entire realm of gastronomy. I know of innumerable episodes of established cheeses being adversely affected by rogue yeasts and bacteria that weren't there before; the same for established "family member" mold strains (also yeasts and bacteria) that for various reasons disappeared or were inadvertently removed and had to be restored. This stuff is the fairy dust that makes artisanal cheeses fly -- or crash to the ground; it is this stuff that is the secret ingredient in the alchemy of cheese. Their application is far from rote; it rather comes about via a combination of happenstance, trial and error, and repetition. You must understand that the cheesemaker doesn't decide what her cheese is going to taste like, nor the shape it will assume. It is the region that will make those decisions. The cheesemaker is just there to help it emerge, like a sculptor who looks at a block of marble or granite or wood and ponders what is inside. A Brie from Brie did not appear to the world one fine day as a thin, flat disk covered with a downy white mold. the Brie region decided. It is that thin shape that SO prospers from the Seine-et Marne slurry of bacteria and yeasts in the air, it is the yeasts that are blown off the fruit trees and wild flowers that grow in the dales between the rivers that provoke the croute-fleurie. It was not a cheesemaker who decided that Cabrales would be a blue cheese of three animal's milks -- it was the Picos de Europa, fifteen miles inland from the Atlantic in Asturias, where the wind currents in the caves have delivered specific bacteria to nascent cheeses as well as having simply oxygen-nourished the bacteria already lying dormant within the immature cheeses. As for the example you request, that of two cheeses with the same recipe made in two very different locales -- wow. Great question. Consider how different are the great Piemonte Castelmagno and Mrs. Kirkham's Lancashire. Normandy's Livarot and Menorca's Mahon. Campania's fiore di latte (cow's milk mozzarella) and Galicia's Tetilla. Asturias' Queso de Vare and Western Andalucia's Queso Ibores. Basque sheep's cheeses and Pecorino Toscano.

Ludja, since my Cheese Primer came out in '97, American (and Canadian) artisanal cheesemaking has become ten times as prolific and remarkable as it was then, and it was rocking then. It has skyrocketed. American and Canadian cheeses have won top prizes at every international competition. Many, even the obscure, have become staples in the inventories of food shops and supermarkets across the country. It's not about advances, nor is it about trends. It's about cheesemakers. As if Sally Jackson's sheep cheeses from Washington weren't enough, Mary Keehn's Cypress Grove goat cheeses (McKinleyville CA), Judy Schad's Capriole Farm goat cheeses (Indiana), Mary Falk's Lovetree Farm sheep cheeses (Wisconsin), Joel Widmer's Wisconsin Brick Cheese, Grafton (VT) Cheddar, all of these cheesemakers among the original signers of the Declaration of American Cheesemaking Independance, we now have all these New Young Bucks making cheeses so fine it's embarrassing. An embarrassment of riches. To list them all here would require more time than I have. I would have you taste the Cato's Corner cheeses from CT, the Sprout Creek Farm cheeses from NY State, the Cowgirl Creamery cheeses from CA, the Bingham Hill Blue from CO, the Berkshire Blue from Mass., the Pleasant Ridge Reserve from the the Uplands Cheese Co. in Wisconsin, everything Allison makes at Vermont Butter and Cheese, particularly her "fontina" of goat's milk, anything Cindy Major makes at the Major Farm in VT, Sadie Kendall's creme fraiche from CA, Jules, raw milk Gouda from the Winchester Cheese Co. down near San Diego (!), the astonishing Thistle Hill Farm (VT) Tarentaise from Vermont, a dead ringer for Savoie's Abondance. Bless you for caring, and continue to keep your heart and your eyes open, at farm stands, greenmarkets, assiduous counters such as those at the three Fairway Markets, and the results of the annual American Cheese Society competition, this year's at Madison, WI in a week or two.

As many of us know and believe, as regards cooking, there are no new recipes, new dishes, only new versions of old ones. That includes all of this raw stuff going on, from which you will please deliver me. Go ahead; add and subtract, substitute and tweak. It's not new; it's just different. The same goes for the realm of cheese. Tweaking the cheesemaking process is the same as fooling around in the kitchen. There are no new cheeses and there never will be. Any digression on this subject will bore the bejeezus out of all of us. This was not a silly question. I thank you for it.

Thanks Tad. I seem to have gone 53 years having pondered neither the fourth dimension nor the fifth sense of taste (umami). That being said, cheese is often salty, rarely sweet, occasionally bitter and never sour. So none of the four senses, in any combination, serves to define cheese. There must be umami somewhere. Where be umami? Ou est la bibliotheque? I promise I will ponder this extemporaneous response to your startling question. Umami must be a subjective intangible that for me must be savory. Savory for me is the only one of the (now -- so we're told) five that is at once a flavor sensation as well as a fragrant one, and it is this fragrant flavor-sense that makes or breaks an edible substance for me, because it is the only one that is capable of transport, of delivering me to another physical place -- the one the foodstuff I am tasting comes from. It is this response, then, that makes a foodstuff MEMORABLE for me, which is the only criterion I seek. I am easily transported by numerous foodstuffs via olfactory, but not so via flavor. Savory, though is both olfactory AND a flavor sense, I believe. And cheese being the most olfactorily shameless of any foodstuff, umami should probably be DEFINED by one's response to certain cheeses. I am further bolstered in my response, ridiculous though it may be, by the fact that I have always vastly preferred non-sweet accompaniments to cheese; dressed olives, Marcona almonds, roasted tomatoes, charcuterie/salumi. I prefer savory with savory. I apparently have always striven to stun myself with umami and I never even knew its name. Godalmighty, I must be losing my mind.